


Sometimes Spider-healing Just Isn't Fast Enough

by Cheshire_XOXO



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Breakups, Domestic Avengers, Domestic Fluff, Everyone Loves Peter Parker, F/M, Irondad, Light Angst, M/M, Michelle Jones Is a Good Bro, Ned Leeds is a Good Bro, Other, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Protective Avengers, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, ironfam
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-14
Updated: 2019-06-14
Packaged: 2020-05-12 00:59:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19218403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cheshire_XOXO/pseuds/Cheshire_XOXO
Summary: Or — It’s been nine months since Peter broke up with his first love, first real relationship, and he’s frustrated that he hasn’t fully recovered from it since clearly his ex already has.—His parents, Aunt May and Uncle Ben, Tony and Pepper… Peter knew what love looked like—what love was supposed to look like. When you love someone, you couldn’t just one day decide that you didn’t love them anymore… right? Love wasn’t supposed to stop, love wasn’t supposed to end. So why did it?The ending of Peter’s first serious relationship has left him with some pretty deep scars and serious damage to his self-worth. Luckily, he’s got some pretty great friends and family to remind him of how much he is loved.





	Sometimes Spider-healing Just Isn't Fast Enough

###  **_[Spontaneous Recovery]_** _Spontaneous recovery is a term associated with learning and conditioning. Specifically, spontaneous recovery is the reappearance of a response (a Conditioned Response; CR) that had been extinguished_

 

* * *

 

Peter loved spending his summers at the Avengers Compound upstate. It was away from the hustle and bustle of the city, and he finally got a chance to relax without having to worry about running into anyone from school. The city still needed Spiderman though, and Tony was more than happy to drive Peter back into the city whenever he wanted to patrol. Scratch that—Tony was more than happy to let _Happy_ drive Peter back into the city whenever he wanted to patrol.

 

Although the quietness of the compound was usually relaxing to Peter, today, it bored him completely out of his mind. Happy had to take Tony and Pepper to a Stark Industries site in Washington for _several_ meetings. Technically, it was Tony’s fault. Everyone knew that Tony Stark had the attention span of two year old whenever it came to any of the more “boring” aspects of his company. Apparently designating Pepper as the CEO of Stark Industries didn’t get him out of _everything_. Tony still had to show up for stockholder meetings, product analysis meetings, press conferences, all that jazz. Pepper knew that it would be hard enough to get Tony away from the compound for just one of those. So she scheduled them all in the same day to be more efficient (and probably torture her loving husband just a little bit).

 

As much fun as that sounded… Peter opted to stay at the compound while he let the adults handle the business stuff. Besides, he wanted to repair his Iron Spider suit. Apparently, when Tony was designing the nanotech suit, he wasn’t expecting it to go toe-to-toe with a shapeshifting genetic biologist science experiment gone wrong [see giant lizard]. The Lizard had ripped all four of the mechanical spider legs off of the suit and nearly tore one of the suit’s arms off. Peter was currently in the lab recalibrating the bonds between each individual nanotech plate to ensure that the suit was less “tear-apart-able”. FRIDAY was currently performing the operation, but it was still taking a significant amount of time, and Peter was very much bored.

 

“Hey, FRIDAY,” Peter asked, “how much longer is this gonna take?”

 

“At current reprogramming speed, the necessary update to the suit should take roughly four hours, 34 minutes and 15 seconds. 14 seconds. 13 seconds—“

 

“Okay, FRIDAY! I get it, I’ll let you do your thing.” Peter interrupted the AI. Peter would never understand how Tony programmed FRIDAY to be sarcastic. Or was FRIDAY learning after observing everyone? Peter decided not to dwell on that one too long, but he definitely made a mental note to be nice to all of the robots from now on just in case they decided to take over the world.

 

He spun around in his chair a couple times before deciding that he should probably find something else to occupy his time. Peter scooted his chair back from his work table and headed up to his room to grab some stuff to keep himself entertained for the time-being.

 

Peter walked over to his desk and picked up the book he was supposed to be reading over the summer, “The Brothers Karamazov.” The book was definitely “thicker than a bowl of oatmeal,” and Peter knew that he should _really_ start reading it at some point. But he shrugged. It was only June, after all. He had plenty of time to read the over 700 page book (that’s what he got for going to a smart school, he thought). If not, then there was always Sparknotes. He laughed to himself and thought about how MJ probably already finished it and was on her second read-through. She was at some art camp in Florida for the month, while Ned was in the Philippines visiting his relatives. Even though he really missed his friends, Peter knew that they were having a lot of fun and enjoying their summer. He was really just excited for Ned to bring back tasty souvenirs.

 

Peter looked around his room for something else that could occupy his time for the next four hours. He peered over his bookshelf for something more fun to read. Although he wasn’t as avid of a reader as MJ, Peter still enjoyed a good book. His three shelf bookcase was double stacked and a bit (very) dusty. So Peter decided to take all of the books off of the shelf and clean off all of the dust. He apologized to his books for not paying them enough attention and allowing them to collect an obscene amount of dust.

 

After cleaning the bookshelf, Peter’s eyes were slightly red and itchy, his nose was slightly stuffy from all the sneezing. Maybe it was because of his enhanced senses, but ever since the spider bite, Peter was allergic to dust. Allergic. To. Dust. It was like his body had a seventh sense that alerted him to even the most minuscule amount of dust in the air.

 

“This is stupid.” Peter voiced out loud and he rubbed his eyes. “Don’t spiders like dusty basements, or something?”

 

Peter gently wiped the dust off of his books to make sure that the dust didn’t poof into the air and irritate his senses. He hummed as he began to return the books to the shelf, organizing them by color. He was halfway through when he realized that, although it would be aesthetically pleasing, it wasn’t very efficient if he needed to find a specific book. He removed the books off of the shelves and started to organize them alphabetically by title.

 

When he reached the letter “T”, Peter rummaged through the remaining pile of books on the floor and came across a small square book titled “The Essential Pokemon Book of Joy.” He bit back a smile at the book. It was cute, but he couldn’t remember where he got it from. He opened the front cover and a small notecard fell out.

 

_“Charmander’s okay,_

_Bulbasaur too,_

_But you’re most like Squirtle_

_‘Cause I would choose you._

 

_Merry Christmas!”_

 

Peter’s smile immediately fell into a frown as he read the handwriting on the notecard. He remembered now. It was a present from _their_ first Christmas together… Peter always chose a fire type starter whenever he played any of the Pokemon games. _He_ always chose water types. They would often playfully debate which type made a better starter.

 

Memories of that day started to flood Peter’s mind. They were happy memories, but Peter just felt so, so _sad_ … It wasn’t until Peter saw the small dark dot on the notecard that he realized a few stray tears were slipping down his cheek.

 

Peter reached under his bed to grab a worn out shoe box. He lifted the cover and placed the book and the notecard inside on top of old letters, photos, movie ticket stubs, drawings, and sticky notes that said things like “You look cute today!” or “Have a great day! Love you!” To anyone else, this box was filled with nothing but trash. But to Peter… He couldn’t just throw them away. He only recently mustered enough courage to delete old text messages. But the letters were different… He couldn’t just throw away someone’s feelings. It’s not like he reread them…

 

Peter was tempted to pick up one of the letters and just skim through the contents out of curiosity. He didn’t remember what any of them said, it had been so long since he read them. But he mustered up enough self control to cover the box with the lid and push it far underneath his bed.

 

“FRIDAY, how long has it been?” Peter asked the AI.

 

“It has been 37 minutes.”

 

“Oh, come on!”

 

Peter jumped on his bed and turned himself slightly with each bounce to see if anything else in his room needed cleaning or reorganizing. He stopped when he looked at the photo collage on the wall in front of his desk. It was filled with pictures of him and Aunt May, him and Tony goofing off, him messing with some of the other Avengers (his favorite picture was a selfie of him with his thumb up and Thor sprawled across the couch in the common area snoring away), pictures of Ned and MJ, the decathlon team… Peter loved taking pictures. But it was kind of hard not to notice the blank spots in the collage with the red paint of the wall showing. He tried not to think about the photos stored in the shoe box and he made a note to replace those empty spots.

 

Yeah, Peter didn’t really feel like cleaning anymore…

 

Peter flopped onto his bed and pulled out his phone. He pulled up his Reddit and started looking through some threads about Spiderman. It wasn’t that he was conceited or anything, he just liked watching videos of himself doing Spidey things for scientific purposes. Yeah, scientific purposes. And he enjoyed watching videos of stopping the car from colliding with the bus. Peter would never get tired of that.

 

After scrolling through his feed a bit more, a specific username caught his attention.

 

Peter didn’t know why he still followed his ex on Reddit. Right after their breakup, Peter had a bad habit of checking his ex’s Reddit every single day. He didn’t know why, but he hoped that his ex would make some comment somewhere about how much he missed him, even though it sounded completely illogical and ridiculous…

 

It took him a while and a little help from Ned and MJ before Peter could refrain from impulsively looking at his ex’s Reddit several times a day. But nine months had passed and Peter was just looking. He wasn’t doing any harm, right?

 

So Peter found himself scrolling through the comments his ex made on different posts. Star Wars, politics, Star Wars, Accords, Pokemon, video games… Nope, nothing out of the ordinary for his ex, Peter thought as he continued to scroll. Then he came across one comment that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up as if his Spidey-senses were warning him of imminent danger.

 

_“Damn, that’s hot. I always look forward to your posts.”_

 

The rational side of Peter told him to absolutely not click on the post no matter what. But his impulsive side won the battle. Before he knew it, Peter’s thumb clicked on the comment and was redirected to a very NSFW photo of a naked woman with her legs crossed and breasts bared.

 

Peter’s stomach dropped and he closed the tab as fast as he could. He gasped and threw his phone as far away from him as he could. Unfortunately, with Peter’s super strength, that meant the phone collided with his wall and broke into a couple of large pieces.

 

Under normal circumstances, his first thought should have been “Oh no, Mr. Stark is going to kill me!” After all, that phone was a prototype of the latest StarkPhone model. But Peter didn’t really know what was going through his mind right now.

 

Peter slid off of his bed and curled into a ball. He just needed to feel as enclosed as possible. Big tears threatened to fall from his eyes. He didn’t understand how he could be breathing so deeply and yet feeling like there wasn’t enough oxygen coming into his lungs. Peter clawed at his chest as he felt a dull, painful ache near his heart.

 

Nine months. It had been nine months since they broke up. His ex is single. This was natural.

 

Peter tried to calm himself down rationally. But that didn’t make the sting hurt any less. After all, this wasn’t the first time he saw a comment like this from his ex. He saw them before too when they were together…

 

They had done some… intimate things during their relationship. Peter was always too nervous and too scared to go all the way with his ex, but Peter felt like he really pushed his boundaries to please his ex. For Peter, it was special, it was vulnerable. It was the most of himself that he could give to another person. Even though it scared him, he wanted to prove so badly how much he loved him. But his ex didn’t seem to think the same way…

 

Thoughts of “Was I not enough?” swirled in Peter’s mind. A small sob wracked his body and he tried to curl further into a ball.  

 

And that was how Tony found him.

**Author's Note:**

> Hi guys! This is my first fic in a long time. Honestly, I just needed to vent and process. A lot—no—almost all of this fic is based off of my own experience with my first breakup, but I’ll say more about this later. I wanted this fic to be something everyone could in some way relate to (especially if you’ve been through a bad breakup), so I tried my best to make Peter’s ex’s gender more ambiguous, but sometimes pronouns are necessary for the sentence structure, so I used “he” because I was in a relationship with a guy. But feel free to substitute that when you’re reading this fic to fit your experience better. 
> 
> Enjoy, and thanks for reading!


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